Opening the door to the RV, Linda was hit with a stale, musty odor. Pond-liner and plywood covered the floor. The walls were draped with more trash bag–type plastic. Water damage, she thought, and her hopes sagged. But as she inspected the inside more closely, she realized the bad smells were wafting out of the shower, which had a hole that wouldn’t be too hard to repair. The rest of the interior was immaculate, from a cozy bedroom in the back to a dinette beside the kitchen. The upholstery, window coverings, and carpet all looked great; she pegged the owner as a type A personality, someone who’d never stepped inside the RV without removing his shoes. Compared to some of the vans she’d been reading about, this place was the Ritz Carlton. The generator was broken, but just about everything else worked, including the flush toilet, which made her glad. (While Linda had read about vandwellers lining five-gallon buckets with plastic to use as portable toilets, she’d already decided that was most definitely not for her.)
Linda could feel her optimism returning. Then a familiar voice cut in. “Oh, no. You can’t. You can’t fix that,” her friend said. But it was too late. Linda had already made up her mind. “Oh, come on, Mrs. ‘I can’t!’” she retorted. “I live by ‘I can.’”
Linda bought the RV. She fixed up the shower, abolishing the funky smell. She didn’t mess with the caulk-filled crater over the cab—while unattractive, it seemed to be holding for now. The tires couldn’t wait, so she spent $1,200 to replace them. That was a major expense, but Linda was investing in her future—her freedom—and already had some ideas about how to keep money flowing in once she was on the road.
Bob had blogged about the three seasons he’d spent working for California Land Management as a camp host in the Sierra National Forest. Following his lead, Linda applied to the same company and landed a gig near Yosemite. “I can’t believe how easy it is to get a job in an RV,” she later reflected. She’d once waited six months for an opening at the Home Depot in San Clemente, and that had been a transfer. Ageism, she knew, could make it painfully hard to find a new job in one’s later years, but the people who hired itinerants for seasonal work didn’t seem to be reading from the same script as other employers. “If you have an RV, go on the internet and you get a job in six seconds,” she marveled.
Linda had also become a fan of Jimbo’s Journeys, the blog of Jim Melvin, a former Lowe’s appliance salesman in his late sixties with a white push-broom mustache. After he realized he’d never be able to afford retirement in his home state of California, Jim took off in a 1992 white and powder blue Lazy Daze RV, citing Tioga George as his inspiration. He traveled between seasonal jobs, first alone and then with Chica, a hungry stray Chihuahua that wandered up to his RV in a trailer park and was thereafter Jim’s declared “soul mate.” Jim did many kinds of work: groundskeeping at Piney Ridge RV Estates in Texas as July temperatures soared past 100 degrees; camp hosting at Ochoco Divide Campground in central Oregon; flipping burgers at Tempe Diablo Stadium in Arizona during spring training for the Los Angeles Angels; and joining CamperForce at the Amazon.com warehouse in Fernley. He described the last of these jobs as the hardest he’d ever had. Getting through it meant taking two Aleve each day. The aches and pains didn’t subside for months. But it paid more than the other gigs and he liked bonding with fellow RVers who were working there. “I have met a lot of very friendly, fun people,” he wrote. “Would I return next year? You bet your sweet bippy!!!”
Linda decided to apply to Amazon, too. The company was offering a $50 referral bonus so she put down Jim’s name. “Thank god for the bloggers, man,” she said. “Can you imagine? We didn’t have that when I was young. If you needed something it was like, ‘Does your neighbor know? Where do you get this information?’ You wouldn’t have known about this community unless you knew somebody from it.”
If Linda survived back-to-back seasonal jobs as a camp host and a CamperForce warehouse worker, she figured she could probably take a break afterward and collect unemployment for a bit. She’d also be able to afford a trip to the Rubber Tramp Rendezvous to meet her new tribe, the family she had joined but had yet to meet.
As for Linda’s actual kin, they were supportive when she announced her plans. “That sounds really exciting!” Audra said. She insisted that Linda would need a smartphone to stay connected and offered to cover her bills on the family plan. “We’ll make sure there’s plenty of data,” Collin added.
Would all of this work out? There was no way to tell. One thing was certain, though: Linda’s life was about to change and, for now, that was enough.
* I got my first- ever truck stop shower for free during the winter of 2014–15 at the Pilot in Quartzsite, Arizona. I left my van carrying soap, shampoo, and flipflops in a plastic bag, walked inside to pay, and probably made a face when I heard it would cost $12. A trucker at the register to my right slid his rewards card over the counter and told the cashier to comp my shower. “Sir, you realize that if you use your card now, you can’t use it again for another twenty- four hours,” the cashier told him. The driver raised his elbows and sniffed under each armpit— first left, then right— and shrugged. “Awwww, it’s already been a week,” he said.
† When I first attended this gathering in 2013, there were about sixty mobile dwellings there. Four years later, in 2017, there were an estimated five hundred rigs.
Part Two
CHAPTER FIVE
Amazon Town
IN JUNE 2013, Linda turned sixty-three and drove the El Dorado RV she’d bought on Craigslist to Junction Campground, two miles from the eastern entrance to Yosemite National Park. This is where her new life as a workamper began—surrounded by wildflower-filled meadows, sparkling creeks, and stands of lodgepole and white-bark pine, with bracing mountain air and postcard views of the snow-dappled Sierra peaks. As a first-time employee of California Land Management, she would be working thirty hours a week for $8.50 an hour. (At this wage, even if Linda convinced her employer to give her full-time, forty-hour weeks all year long—and didn’t take any vacations—her annual salary would amount to $17,680, with no benefits.)
Linda was only a half day’s drive from the Home Depot in Lake Elsinore where she’d been a cashier, but the wilderness felt utterly remote. This new camp hosting job was the antithesis of running a checkout line under the sallow lights of a big-box store. It felt nothing like her gigs at restaurants, construction sites, casinos, or corporate offices, all the other places where she’d traded time for money. Best of all, she’d be getting paid while living rent-free. Though the campsite lacked utility hookups, her supervisor lent her a generator and dispatched a water truck each Tuesday to fill the fifty-five-gallon tank on her RV. Her living expenses were now pared down to groceries, diesel for the generator, and propane for the stove. Linda was elated.
Junction Campground wasn’t very demanding. Its thirteen sites were filled on a first-come, first-served basis—eliminating the hassle of reservations and the resulting time-consuming paperwork—and there were only two outhouse toilets to clean. So for part of her stay, Linda agreed to handle another small campground on nearby Tioga Lake.
Linda loved the social aspect of her work, chatting up vacationers. One of her favorite visitors was a solitary sixty-nine-year-old rock climber who she knew as “Mr. Brown.” He ascended popular routes all over Yosemite, scouring the rock face for decades-old fixed anchors that were starting to corrode. Since those anchors secure climbers’ safety ropes, when they go bad, the consequences can be deadly. Whenever Mr. Brown found a piece of failing hardware, he pried it out and installed a fresh one. He told Linda he’d been doing this for fifteen years. “The pack he carried,” she marveled. “Oh my god! What a monster that was.” While she admired his generosity and stamina, she was concerned for him, too. “Don’t you worry that you could fall to your death?” she demanded. “Awww, nawwww,” Mr. Brown replied in a craggy, mountaineer’s grumble. “I know what I’m doing.” Another pair of campers Linda met on the job, Billy and Helene Outlaw—their real las
t name—were septuagenarian RVers. When they mentioned they were looking for camp hosting work, Linda introduced them to her bosses. Before long, they had taken over her duties at Tioga Lake. Around the same time, Linda learned that camp hosting wasn’t a good fit for everyone. One of her coworkers, a former border patrolman, insisted on making his daily rounds with a firearm. “He decided he couldn’t exist without a gun on his side,” she explained. “But the camp host can’t be packing. They’re not gonna take it at a National Forest if the camp host is packing. They had to let him go.”
Linda’s summer near Yosemite went smoothly until mid-August. That’s when investigators believe a solitary bow hunter used twigs and pine needles to build a small campfire—illegal at the time—to heat soup and burn garbage from his backpack. He had been seeking deer in the remote Clavey River Canyon of Stanislaus National Forest, just fifty miles west of Junction Campground. When embers blew into the dry brush, the third-largest blaze in California history began. Over the next two months, the Rim Fire incinerated an area more than seventeen times the size of Manhattan.
By September, with smoke thickening the air at her campground, it was time for Linda to move on. She said her good-byes, then drove north to Fernley to join Amazon’s CamperForce—the second workamping job she’d applied for. The trailer parks near the warehouse were already bustling and fully booked with itinerant workers; space was so tight that Amazon trainers were telling CamperForce members at orientation that the company was considering buying land nearby to build its own trailer park. Linda hadn’t made a reservation; she’d spent most of the summer cut off from cell and internet service. Twenty-three miles southeast of the warehouse, she found the Sage Valley RV Park: a fenced-off gravel patch just off Highway 50 in Fallon, Nevada, dotted with cottonwoods and perfumed with the funk of nearby cow pastures. It was also fully booked with CamperForce, but she talked a sympathetic manager into making room for her.
Before the 2013 peak shipping season began, Amazon had put out the latest round of digital newsletters for prospective workers. The front page of the June edition read “CamperForce: The Value of Friendship.” Echoing the cheery tone of the camp hosting brochures, it made a tough physical job sound like summer camp. “One benefit that’s worth its weight in gold is the benefit of building lasting friendships!” it enthused. “While the monetary reward is a big part of the reason [to work], friendship is very close to the top! Each year we hear stories about friendships and relationships that are made that will continue once the ‘Tail Light Parade’ has left Amazon.”
That contrasted with the March edition. In a section called “Getting Ready to Make History in 2013!” it recommended a preparatory fitness regimen and addressed some challenges of aging:
Getting prepared both physically and mentally will be the key to you having a successful peak season at Amazon. We cannot stress enough the importance of arriving at Amazon physically prepared. If you’ve not exercised regularly, consult your physician about a conditioning program, then get active! Here’s a low cost suggestion: Get out and walk! Walking is a great form of exercise. It doesn’t cost anything and is easier on the joints than other forms of exercise. Before setting out, warm up those muscles by stretching. Experts say that as we get older, the collagen structure in our bodies changes, reducing our flexibility and range of motion.
The April edition went on to mention some psychological challenges of the work. Under the headline “What to Expect Your First Few Weeks in the Amazon CamperForce Program,” it read:
Your first few weeks at Amazon can be a little intimidating. The size of the facility, the acronyms that seem to be a different language, the hand-held scanners that act as if they have a mind of their own, all contribute to that feeling of being overwhelmed . . .
Meanwhile, Amazon’s treatment of warehouse workers had been making headlines since 2011. That’s when an investigation by the Allentown Morning Call newspaper revealed what were—quite literally—sweatshop conditions. When summer temperatures exceeded 100 degrees inside the company’s Breinigsville, Pennsylvania, warehouse, managers wouldn’t open the loading bay doors for fear of theft. Instead, they hired paramedics to wait outside in ambulances, ready to extract heat-stricken employees on stretchers and in wheelchairs, the investigation found. Workers also said they were pressured to meet ever greater production targets, a strategy colloquially known as “management by stress.” Amazon monitors productivity in real time, analyzing data from networked scanner guns that employees use as they move and sort merchandise. Laura Graham, a CamperForce member who worked as a picker in the Coffeyville, Kansas, warehouse, told me each time she scanned a product, a countdown began on her screen. It indicated how many seconds she had to reach the next item, as if she’d graduated to the next level in a video game. Her progress toward hourly goals was also tracked. When an accidental trip down the wrong aisle left her more than five minutes behind schedule, a supervisor arrived to scold her. (Apart from the mental pressure, Laura’s body rebelled against the demands of the device, which directed how she walked from ten to twenty miles a day on concrete in the 915,000-square-foot complex for $11.25 an hour. “There’s nothing to describe the misery, physically,” she told me. “I started getting these really sharp pains through my arches . . . it ended up being plantar fasciitis.” Putting new insoles in her shoes didn’t help. To cope, she took two ibuprofen tablets halfway through the graveyard shift, which ran from 5:30 p.m. to 3:30 a.m., and another two at the end. On days off, she tried to keep from using her feet, lying in bed except for visits to the bathroom or shower.)
LINDA, HOWEVER, WAS NOT intimidated by anything she’d heard about the warehouses. Nor was she a stranger to tough, physical labor. “I was in construction and I cocktail-waitressed, which was harder work than construction,” she recalled. “What would I be worried about?” Besides, she had just finished camp hosting at more than nine thousand feet above sea level. In terms of getting in shape, she figured that had to count for something.
When her first week began, Linda sat through orientation and safety workshops. She learned that she had been assigned to be a “stower,” someone who shelves inbound freight. To learn the particulars of that job, she went to what the company calls “process school.”
Stowers push carts loaded with yellow plastic tubs—aka “totes”—full of newly arrived items through the aisles of library-style shelving where Amazon stores merchandise. (In company jargon, these areas are called “pick modules.”) Each shelf is split with plastic dividers into units called “bins,” and stowers are constantly hunting for bins with free space, so they can unload their wares. When shelving an item, the stower must point a handheld scanner gun at a code on the front of the bin and also scan the product that will be placed there. The process is slow, because employees are told to distribute identical items that arrived in the same shipment across different bins, spreading them out, rather than keeping them grouped together. This makes work more efficient for the “pickers,” workers who rush through the aisles collecting products to fill customer orders. “It’s weird!” Linda said, recalling the motley assortment of items that might share the same bin. “Brake fluid, baby formula, eyeshadow, a book, a tape . . . it’s all in there.”
After her introduction to stowing, Linda finished her first week with what Amazon calls “work-hardening”: a series of half-days to acclimate newcomers to walking on concrete, so they’ll be able to do it for ten hours or more when the orientation period ends. Linda had requested the overnight shift, since its hourly wage was 75 cents higher, bringing it to $12.25 an hour plus overtime. “I wanted all the money I could make,” Linda said. When her full schedule began, she worked from 6 p.m. until 4:30 a.m., with two fifteen-minute breaks and thirty minutes for a quick meal. “I was sleeping all day,” she added. “That kind of changes your life.” After rising in the early afternoon, she typically had a three-hour window to do chores, prepare a bag lunch, and walk her dogs around Sage Valley RV Park. Then she made the twe
nty-five-minute commute back to the warehouse.
When each shift started, Linda donned an orange reflective vest and a lanyard with her security badge, grabbed a freshly charged battery for her handheld scanner, and went to “stand up”—a gathering where workers do stretches as supervisors rattle off productivity goals. Next she hit the floor, scanning UPC barcodes while shelving thousands of products. “You have a cart with fourteen tubs of Chinese junk,” she told me. “One of the depressing parts was I knew all this stuff was going to end up in a landfill.” That part demoralized her. “You think about all the resources it took to get it there,” she mused. “And then it’s ‘Use it up. Throw it away.’” The work was tiring. Apart from walking up and down endless aisles, she was bending, lifting, squatting, reaching, and climbing and descending stairs, all while traversing a warehouse roughly the size of thirteen football fields. The place was so immense that workers used the names of states to navigate its vast interior, calling the western half “Nevada” and the eastern half “Utah.”
In early October, after Linda’s first two weeks on the job, she posted to Facebook, “If I live through this I’ll be in great shape. I keep thinking of The Biggest Loser”—referring to the televised weight-loss competition—“and if they can do it so can I.” She also repeated to herself a mantra she knew from Alcoholics Anonymous: “Don’t give up before the miracle happens.”
At that point, Linda had been sober for more than two decades. Earlier in life she’d faced a struggle that had felt almost inevitable—a taste for liquor was etched into the family genes and, even if it hadn’t been, Linda’s alcoholic father seemed determined to pass the trait along. Toward the end of Linda’s high school years, he’d introduced her to sloe gin fizzes, which he made in the blender each night with fresh lemon and powdered sugar. He and Linda would stay up late, drinking and talking. He’d started playing the stock market and would try to teach her about finance; she thought he was a genius. They developed a morning routine. He’d open the door to her bedroom. “Are you going to school?” he’d ask. “I’m hung over,” she’d moan. “Oh, poor baby!” he’d reply, gently closing the door.
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